


Bill Cipher's First Birthday

by saezutte



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Cuddling, M/M, Snuggling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-16
Updated: 2015-11-16
Packaged: 2018-05-01 21:31:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5221619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saezutte/pseuds/saezutte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Mabel finds out Bill doesn't have a birthday, she decides to give him one and throw him a party. Dipper is strongly opposed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bill Cipher's First Birthday

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the realization that Bill Cipher might be an ageless dream demon with no concept of human time but he is also definitely a Gemini and that’s just a burden we Geminis are going to have to bear. So here's a fic giving him a birthday (my birthday) and Dipper giving him a present. 
> 
> Mabel and Dipper are older, like college age (because why not); Bill is in triangle form the whole time. Sorry if anyone objects to that and sorry for any GF canon mistakes! I'm new to this fandom.

The clearing was darker than the time of day and leaf cover would suggest. Any sunlight that could make it through the foliage was washed out in the bright golden gleam of the demon at the center of Dipper’s summoning circle.

“Just admit it was you so we can get on with this!” Dipper spat.  

“I’m flattered you always think of me first when something goes wrong, Pine Tree, but I didn’t have anything to do with your vanishing livestock.”

“Lying as usual!”

Bill sighed. “I do so love our little chats, Pine Tree, and I love causing you problems in general, so I’m sad to admit that I honestly didn’t have anything to do with this one.”

“I’m going to need more than your word on that before I let you go, so you better start convincing me.” Dipper glared. Bill narrowed his eye slightly which Dipper took as a returning glare. He always did like it when he’d caught Bill’s attention, made him look at him and acknowledge him as more than just a human with some magic books. He wanted to get under Bill’s skin, assuming that any part of that triangle could be called skin.

A crisp crinkle of leaves under shoes broke the silence of their glaring reverie. He kept one eye on Bill as he turned slightly to see what was coming.

“Are you finished yet, bro?” It was Mabel’s high clear voice stepping towards them.  

“Mabel, I’m in the middle of something.” He turned back to glaring at Bill who was floating, unbothered, above the circle.

She rolled her eyes. “We’re going to be late for Grenda’s birthday party.”

“This won’t take long, I just want some answers.”

“Birthdays! I never understood why humans get so excited about being one year closer to decrepitude and death.” Bill chuckled. “Just one more charming detail that makes you all—” he twirled his cane “—total morons!”

Dipper snarled at him but a small voice behind him stopped him from laying into Bill.

“You don’t celebrate your birthday?” Mabel’s expression was concerned.

“Shooting Star, sweetheart, I don’t have a birthday.”

The twins spoke at once.

“Don’t call my sister swee—”

“That’s so sad—”

Bill zeroed in on Mabel and Dipper felt a pang of annoyance. “Sad? Even if I could feel such a silly emotion as “sad”, what would I do with a birthday?” He floated so he was tilted slightly towards one side, a gesture Dipper had learned to recognize as his “confused” posture.

“Aww, you,” Mabel said. It was almost affectionate. Dipper was horrified and Bill tilted sideways a little more. She smiled brightly. “Birthdays are great! You get cake and presents and all your friends show you how much they care.”

Silence fell in the clearing again while Dipper and Bill both stared at Mabel. Dipper couldn’t tell what Bill was thinking but he was trying and failing to picture Bill surrounded by family and friends at a birthday party as though he were human and normal and not a weird freaking demon triangle. Did Bill even have friends? Dipper didn’t want to know or know _them_ if he did.

A horrifying peal of laughter broke the silence. “Ha ha! That sounds great for you mortals, I guess, but I get cake and presents and trembling fealty from lesser beings every day, if that’s what I want! You kids slay me sometimes, I haven’t laughed this hard in decades.” He wasn’t really laughing that much, though.

Mabel looked thoughtful, which worried Dipper. Best to end this and head out to the party.

“I’ll release you, Bill, but don’t think this is over! I know you’ve been using those goats for nefarious purposes!” He leaned down to undo the binding circle and send Bill back to the mindscape.

“Oh sure, I’ll think long and hard about all the terrible things I’ve been doing with your random animals.” Bill rolled his eye.  

“See you soon, Bill!” Mabel called, chipper, and Dipper started. That tone of voice on Mabel was more ominous than anything Bill had done.

Bill sounded just as confused as Dipper felt. “You too? Enjoy celebrating your own mortality, kids!” He popped out of their realm without even a parting threat.

Dipper felt an odd foreboding that lingered with him throughout Grenda’s birthday party, particularly when he heard Mabel asking where she’d gotten the decorations.

* * *

A week later, his foreboding came true.

The flyers were, in true Mabel style, bright and colorful, designed with the visual sense of a budding fashion designer and amateur party planner who was also heavily familiar with the supernatural world of mysteries. Clever codes and weird symbols, strange monsters and an all-seeing eye, everything that had come to represent Gravity Falls for them, decorated the paper. It looked cool and, were circumstances different, Dipper would have been excited to check out the party.

Of course, it wasn’t the design but the content that bothered Dipper, starting with the title at the top: BILL CIPHER TURNS UNKNOWABLE EONS OLD, MYSTERY SHACK, JUNE 10.

“Mabel, what are you doing?” He knew perfectly well what she was doing: hanging flyers around town for an event.

“Isn’t it exciting! I got the idea the other night when he said he’d never had a birthday!”

She was bouncing on the balls of her feet. She stuck a flyer to a bulletin board outside the community center as Dipper gestured desperately.

“You can’t just throw a birthday party for Bill!”

“Why not? The Grunkles are gone on their world sight-seeing trip, so the Shack is ours for the summer.”

“That’s not the issue! He’s a demon, he’s evil, he’s—”

“Seriously, bro? That sort of thinking is really immature, don’t you think? We’re almost twenty, you know the world is more than just black and white.”

“The regular world might be but not the demon world!”

With a satisfied glance at the flyer she’d hung, Mabel gathered up her flyers and her bag of assorted things for sticking them up and started walking to her next flyering location.

“Hey! Stop, we’re not done here—”  

“Make sure you get him a present!” She called over her shoulder.

Oh, now that was too much. He caught up with her. “A present?! For Bill?!”

“It’s his first birthday, Dipper! We have to show him how fun and great birthdays are!” she said calmly as though she weren’t talking complete and utter insanity.

“What would he even do with presents from us?”

“Don’t worry about that! It’s the thought that counts! I’m knitting him some mittens — you know he gets cold when he’s in our world.”

“I don’t know any such thing! How do you even know that!” Dipper shouted. He felt bad but he also felt like he was losing his mind.

Mabel looked at him strangely. “Dipper, we’ve known him for like a decade. We hang out with him every summer.”

“Only when he’s causing mayhem!”

She put one hand on her hip and looked at him, that I See What You’re Doing You Can’t Hide From Me twin power look. “More like you always find a reason to think he’s causing mayhem, so you summon him, so he causes more mayhem, sometimes even solves some mayhem and we hang out.”

“That’s not what happens at all!”

“Whatever. I gotta hang these up right away, bro. The party is this weekend!”

Dipper watched her walk away with a sinking feeling.

* * *

After almost ten years of summers spent in Gravity Falls, Dipper had, it turned out, underestimated how freaking weird this town and its residents were.

Anyone who was anyone in Gravity Falls had shown up to Bill Cipher’s First Birthday Party.

Only a few of them had some idea about the true weirdness of Gravity Falls and even fewer of those understood what a Bill Cipher was, but that hadn’t stopped hundreds of people from being lured out to the Mystery Shack by Mabel’s flyers (and, more likely, her facebook event) for the Weirdest Bash of This Millennium.

The weirdest part of it was right in the center of the action: Bill Cipher, floating around like it was a totally normal place for him to be, charming locals with a constant patter of flattery and deceit. He’d changed his top hat to a birthday hat and made it rainbow (“In honor of my gracious host! Maybe her dreams be always rainbows and unicorns!” he’d said in his first toast of the night. They were on toast number five now.)

People kept complimenting Mabel on her robotics work or hologramming skills, whatever they wanted to believe Bill was. A few others gave her high-fives for her demon or spirit familiar summoning and binding; this was, after all, Gravity Falls.

Dipper, meanwhile, was sulking as far as he could get from the center of the party. He hoped his annoyance would bring the party down to the appropriate level of celebration: that is to say, zero to negative amounts of celebration, since this was a fake birthday party for an evil demon.

Mabel, who had an instinct for always finding the saddest person at a party in order to cheer them up, found him immediately.

“What up, Dippity-doo-da?”

“What is wrong with everyone?” He knew he sounded whiny but he didn’t care. “Do they even know who he is? He’s tried to destroy the world half a dozen times that we know of, he’s completely evil, and he’s not sorry for any of it!”

She shrugged. “Life here is pretty weird, bro. He’s sometimes bad and he’s always weird but that’s how life here works. I think people came because it’s a little like carnival in medieval times, right? Celebrating the weirder, wilder parts of society.”

Laughter rang out from the bonfire as people began to dance. A ghostly jazz band had appeared at a flick of Bill’s wrist. Dipper watched as he stretched a black arm out to Mrs. Pierce, the stodgy middle-aged head of the PTA, to spin her around with the other dancers. Instead of screaming, she yelped in laughter and let herself be pulled, until her husband slipped her out of Bill’s grasp. Dipper sighed in relief.

Maybe Mabel had a point, but he couldn’t let this go. “But Bill? Is more than pretty weird.”

“He’s not that bad. You seem to love hanging out with him alone in clearings.”

Dipper flushed — with anger, of course! not embarrassment at the implications. “I’m making sure he doesn’t cause more problems for us!”

“He hasn’t caused problems for us in years. He’s even helped us some. But summoning him is still the first thing you do when you get to town.”

“Why do you think he hasn’t been causing us problems? It’s because he knows I’m keeping tabs on him!”

Mabel pursed her lips. “Oh, it’s got something to do with you, all right.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He folded his arms across his chest like that would stop her from continuing. It didn’t.

“You know he has this weird thing about you: ‘Pine Tree’s pretty clever for a mortal’, ‘Pine Tree’s got potential’, ‘Pine Tree, come rule the world with me’, et cetera, et cetera. Not to mention that ‘I’m always watching’ business.” Her Bill impression was dead on.

“So? What are you trying to say?” Dipper mumbled but he already knew.

She smiled and clapped. “I’m saying you should go find him and talk! It’s his birthday!”

“It’s really not,” he said but she was already pushing him into the crowd to look for Bill.

* * *

He found Bill easily, of course, since he was the only floating triangle at this party. He was surrounded by people.

“And then I told Dick that if he had wanted to keep the presidency, he shouldn’t have been secretly recording our meetings in the first place!”

Everyone laughed at the punch line of whatever story (probably made up? Dipper assumed) Bill was telling. Dipper forced his way into the circle to see Bill.

Bill looked and sounded euphoric, like he was high on the attention of everyone listening to him and Dipper thought that was probably true: Bill loved an audience, though Dipper wasn’t sure if he loved it in the normal drama queen way or in a demon literally feeding off human energy and attention way. There was no point in trying to talk to him when this big of a crowd was hanging on his every word.  

He was about to slip off to sulk again when Bill spotted him.

“Pine Tree! I was wondering where you were!”

“Er. You were?”

Bill ignored the question and waved the people around him away. “You kids scram. Go get yourselves in trouble! Embrace your inner chaos as you inevitably stumble towards death!” The crowd dispersed, leaving Bill and Dipper alone.

“Mabel wanted me to talk to you, so here I am.” Dipper forced the words out through gritted teeth.

Bill floated onto his side and rested his top point on his hand, like a human resting their head on their hand. “Oh? Talk to me? Little ol’ me, talking to you? Whatever could it be about?”

The sounds of the party were still loud in Dipper’s ears and Bill’s grating voice didn’t help. “Just come on,” he said and walked a little ways away, where he dropped down unceremoniously on the grass. The light from the bonfire was still visible and the music audible but he could hear himself think a little better.

Until he remembered that Bill was following him. He floated down so he was looking up at Dipper on the grass.

“Do I get my present now?” Bill said. He fluttered his eyelashes.

“I didn’t get you a present, asshole.”

Bill’s eye widened. “What! You didn’t! I’m shocked! And appalled! At your blatant disregard for human birthday customs. This is beyond the pale, such disrespect for your own people’s noble traditions—”

“I didn’t know what to get you!” Dipper burst out and then covered his own traitorous mouth. So, yeah, fine, he’d thought about getting Bill something, he’d wanted to get him something just to see if he could shock the demon with a devastatingly appropriate gift. But he hadn’t thought of anything. “And I wouldn’t get you a present for your fake birthday anyway!” He scrambled to cover up his slip but it was too late.

Bill was staring at him and floating closer and closer to his face. Then he pulled back and straightened his bow tie carefully, which was ridiculous because the damn thing seemed to move wherever he wanted it anyway. “You could have asked what I wanted.”

“Fine. I owe you one. What do you want?” He leaned back. “And don’t say my body—”

“Your body,” Bill said.

Dipper yelped. “I’m not letting you possess me! Honestly, fuck off!”

“That’s no way to speak to the guest of honor! What’s that mortal saying? ‘It’s my party and I’ll take your body if I want to’?” He sang the last bit in a falsetto as he floated closer. “But I didn’t mean I wanted your body to _possess_. Maybe I want your body for other reasons.” Bill didn’t technically, apparently, have a mouth but Dipper still got the impression he was grinning lasciviously.

“I’m not— you can’t do _that_ to my body either, you pervert!”

“Do what to your body, kid? Spell it out for me, I can’t tell what you’re thinking. Oh wait, I can!” Bill laughed. His edges were tinted slightly orange, which Dipper read as “mirth (at his expense).”

“I don’t know why you’d even think I’d—” Dipper sputtered.

“Relax, kid. I mean, you know very well why I’d think that since I’ve seen your dreams — some of them are pretty fucked up! what’s up with that! — but I wasn’t actually going to demand you give up your body for my sexual delights. Though I’m told that, in the customs of your people, ‘birthday sex’ is a well-accepted—”

“Oh my _god_ , will you shut up already?” He grumbled. “If you don’t want to possess me and you don’t want— er— that, then what do you want?”

“Wow, Pine Tree, so eager to please! It’s a good look for you.” Bill floated closer, so he was just above Dipper’s crossed legs. “I want your body heat.”

“My— what?!”

“I’m chilly. It’s hard being in the corporeal realm. The temperature changes according to things other than my whims.”

Dipper wondered what he had done in a previous life to deserve this and then thought of what Mabel had said. “Fine, you can sit on my lap and I’ll, I don’t know, give you body heat.”

“The word you’re looking for is cuddle and as part of my birthday gift, I want you to use it.” He adjusted himself so he was about the size of a large small dog and settled in Dipper’s lap.

It was odd, since Bill barely had a third dimension; it was like having a piece of cardboard on his lap but flatter. He didn’t know where to put his hands, keeping them helplessly in the air for a moment, but Bill settled that for him by reaching out and grabbing both of them so they were crossed in front of him. Dipper could feel the bowtie but it also felt more like a void of nothingness instead of a piece of fabric, which made sense (in that it didn’t make any sense.)

“Good. And what do we call this?” The sense of self-satisfaction radiating from Bill was a step beyond even his usual smugness.

“Cuddling,” Dipper grumbled. Hearing that, Bill settled in, leaning back against Dipper.

Dipper pressed a hand to Bill’s front. The place where the bricks fit together really was grooved and warm to the touch. “You feel plenty warm to me.”

“Hmm, it’s external warmth, not internal.” His voice was slower, quieter than Dipper ever remembered it being. He sounded almost drowsy. Was Bill falling asleep? Could Bill fall asleep?

He moved his hand across Bill again. He did feel warm, like he was radiating heat slightly, like a lightbulb that had just been turned off. Dipper tightened his arms a little, as though that would help keep the warmth from escaping. Bill made a little noise, somewhere between a moan and a sigh but still not anything like a sound a human could make.

Bill’s own arms were circling around Dipper’s, long black ribbons wrapping around them. For a moment, Dipper was scared but Bill didn’t tighten his arms or try to pull. He just wanted Dipper to keep his arms in place.

This wasn’t too bad, Dipper realized. If Bill was this close, he couldn’t cause trouble with the other party guests.  

Dipper leaned back to lie down on the grass.

“Hey! What are you doing!” Bill squawked.

“This will be more comfortable.” He stretched out and pulled Bill up against his chest. In this position, they could see the stars and, honestly, Dipper needed any distraction he could get from the warmth of cuddling with Bill Cipher.

“That’s your head thing,” Bill mumbled after they had been lying there for a minute. Dipper could see it too.

“Yep. And I know you know what it’s called.” Dipper was about to add a constellation when Bill said instead:

“Dipper.”

He flushed. It hadn’t sounded like Bill was saying the name of the stars; it sounded like Bill was saying his name. Dipper suddenly felt hot all over. He hoped that warmth was warming Bill up enough for him to be satisfied with his birthday present.

He looked up at the sky carefully, trying not to think about Bill doing the same thing in his arms.

Dipper lost track of time; it could have been hours later when Bill spoke again.

“Can you carry me to the drinks table?”

“Why? You don’t even drink.”

“I know, I just want everyone to see you carrying me.” Bill was glowing with smugness.

“Ugh! Seriously why are you such a—” Bill’s arms around his tightened a little, like he was trying to be threatening but it just came off as desperate to Dipper. All the same, he was horrified to find that a part of him found Bill’s desperation to maintain contact _endearing_ like, ugh, it was almost _cute_. He made a mental note to punch himself repeatedly in the face later and sighed.

“Fine, but only because it’s your birthday.” He stood up, with Bill held against his chest still, and walked back to the party. “Happy birthday, Bill,” he muttered against Bill’s apex.  

Dipper was likely losing his mind (all signs pointed to yes), but he swore Bill turned faintly pink as he said it.


End file.
